Everything has changed - from how we live, and how we work, to how we conduct business. Over the past 12-18 months, more and more businesses required their employees to work from home, leading to the acceleration in adoption of digital communications tools, with technologies like Zoom and Teams becoming an integral part of our work-life. In this article, we uncover and explain the benefits of VoIP, and how switching from ISDN telephone systems to VoIP provides mobility, flexibility and improved productivity.
What is VoIP?
The VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) service allows you to make phone calls over the internet. In addition to VoIP, there are other terms used to refer to the technology, such as hosted VoIP, business VoIP, cloud telephony, etc. Since VoIP systems continue to improve technologically, VoIP is in high demand in today's Internet-driven society. In VoIP systems, a dedicated fiber or broadband internet connection is used to power the phone system, removing the need for copper telephone lines. Further, this removes the need to house a PBX system on your premises, since the software and firmware is managed in the cloud instead, providing redundancy and hence reliability.
Benefits of VoIP Phone Systems
Many businesses are moving their telecommunications to the cloud, and realizing several benefits in the process. Here are a few benefits that a VoIP system can provide you:
1. Cost-effective: Since VoIP operates on a lighter footprint than the traditional phone systems, you can eliminate costs related to POTS lines, managing and maintaining PBX hardware, rollover numbers and per minute charges for each call. Further, you also realize ongoing cost savings since VoIP plans typically offer unlimited nationwide voice, SMS and video calling, all through one integrated platform, for one low price per user.
2. Mobility: With VoIP, employees no longer need to be tethered to their desks in order to take a call. VoIP enables your company to operate its voice services remotely through the internet. Most platforms will allow a user to be able to use their desk phone, AND apps for your cell phone or laptop. These mobile or laptop based apps are meant to mimic the desk phone in your office, without you having to be in the office. You can send and receive phone calls on your office phone number from anywhere, at any time. A business today has a clear competitive advantage because of this workforce mobility.
3. Highly Reliable: VoIP provide highly reliable service, with most platforms offering 99.99% uptime. This is achieved by providing redundancies and fail safes. With VoIP, your phone system is replicated in real-time across multiple data centers, therefore eliminating the single point of failure inherent with traditional phone systems. Your VoIP system will failover to a backup instance automatically if hardware problems occur at the data center where the primary instance resides.
4. Simple Conference Calls, more collaboration: Conference calls are a lot easier to schedule and manage, since they are conducted over a converged network instead of a dedicated telephone line. Traditional business phone systems are capable of hosting conference calls, but this will require you to purchase additional services, and invariably results in dropped calls and participants, and general frustration. Many VoIP telephone systems have made it an easy customer experience to schedule, join and manage calls, and this feature is normally included in the VoIP package as opposed to being an add-on from the phone company. Additionally, VoIP services facilitate video conference calls as well, via an integrated platform. VoIP phones make it much easier for business personnel to interact face-to-face while they are away from the office.
5. Ease of Installation, Configuration, Maintenance: A major advantage of VoIP is its ease of installation-even for less technically skilled users. It isn't necessary to have expert technicians run wires throughout your office, making the installation of a VoIP phone system plug and play easy. Further, the VoIP system provides the platform administrator the ability to provide role based access to features at the individual user level, such as creating blacklists of “do not answer” numbers to avoid spamming the system, or the ability to make international calls. Due to the simplicity of this system, and cloud hosting, maintenance is straightforward, and professional assistance, when required, is just a phone call away.
6. Scalability: VoIP is highly scalable, letting you add lines, based on your business requirements, so your VoIP system not only helps your business grow, it grows with your business. With our user based pricing, when you hire employees you can budget for future growth and they can be setup with an extension and a seat in minutes. This high scalability ensures sustained productivity for your team, regardless of where they are located. When you hire employees, you can add lines, and when you downsize, you can remove lines. You only pay for what you need.
No phone system has 100 percent uptime, but voip phones systems generally achieve “five nines,” meaning most providers have enough redundancies to achieve 99.999 percent uptime with VoIP.
The capability to choose where your calls are forwarded, and how, means that you also don't have to lose productivity because of local power outages or weather-related events. If the office phone can't be answered, your mobile device or laptop can.
